This will come as sad news to my children, to whom I’ve been a mother for over 20 years now.

It will come as a shock to my wife, too, to whom I’ve been married for 30 years.

It would have been a disappointment for my mother, as well — the conservative, evangelical Christian Republican, who, when she learned I was transgender, two decades ago, said, “I would never turn my back on my child,” and then quoted First Corinthians: “These three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.”

It has been a hard life for me, these last 60 years, but on the whole I have felt grateful for the many blessings that have come my way, and being trans not least.

It is so disappointing, then, and more than a little embarrassing, to learn I’m imaginary — a creature no more real than the cyclops, or a hippogriff.

On Sunday, news broke that the Trump administration seeks to narrowly define gender as an immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth. About 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender would find that identity eradicated by the federal government.

I admit that I’m reluctant to react to this latest cruelty, which is obviously just one more cynical move clearly designed to stir the pot ahead of the election. Trans people are the latest conservative whipping girl, like African-Americans in the 1950s, or gay people in the 1990s and 2000s. Nothing is more dependable now than the passion the heartless display when trans people’s humanity is offered up for mockery.

I was speaking at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Festival in Rockville, Md., this weekend, when I first read about the administration’s intentions. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about Nick Carraway, in “The Great Gatsby,” who yearns for a world “in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.”

Who would not want to live in such a world — a place in which things are ordered and simple, a world in which you never have to make room for people whose experience of being human is so radically different from your own? Conservatives, in particular, seem to yearn for such a place.

But then, that would surely be a world in which everyone would be nearly the same — drab and soulless, like Trump Tower.

Instead, the actual world contains all sorts of wonderful variations of nature. Look: There are toucans and puffins! There is the duck-billed platypus and the blue lobster! The Venus fly-trap! Isn’t it a miracle that God has given us all these wonderful things?

Surely, if there is room in this world for these, there should be room in this world for me.

Up until now, there has been, and more of it in recent years, as government and culture have become a little more accepting. But now that America is great again, people like me are to be redefined out of existence.

President Trump and company should be prepared for the consequences of this decision —because the people most likely to be disappointed in this Glum New World will be themselves.

They will be disappointed to find themselves — if they are men — standing in a men’s room with me. Even though I have breasts and a vagina and a clitoris (and I do thank you for asking), in the new world that they’re creating I’ll be right there in the boy’s room with them, checking my bra straps and putting on eyeliner — you know, because of the Y chromosome that they insist is the only gender marker that matters.

Don’t like this world? Well, you could have left us alone.

Republican parents of transgender children will now find their trans sons and daughters endangered by freshly empowered bullies. How will those parents react when their vulnerable, frightened children come home in tears — or bruised, or not at all? Will these children make the choice of Leelah Alcorn, who decided that rather than live in such a world, she would throw herself beneath the wheels of a truck?

Don’t like this world? Well, you could have left us alone.

I have news for Donald Trump. I do exist. Trans men and women exist. Genderqueer people exist. We have been part of this country for hundreds of years — since before the Revolution, in fact. Redefining us won’t make us go away. It won’t restore your world to its precious, boring binary — which, I hate to tell you, never existed in the first place.

All it will do is make people suffer.

Can any good come out of this miserable moment? Well, I can hope that this will inspire people, more than ever, to fight back — not just trans people — but our spouses, and our children, and our allies, too. Their numbers will include people not unlike my late mother — conservative Republican women who just can’t stand to see their children bullied by the one person in the country who ought to be most concerned with keeping us all safe.